Stephen Oppenheimer
Stephen Oppenheimer (born 1947) is a British paediatrician, geneticist, and writer. He is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In addition to his work in medicine and tropical diseases, he has published popular works in the fields of genetics and human prehistory. This latter work has been the subject of a number of television and film projects.
Career
Oppenheimer trained in medicine at
He spent three years undertaking fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, studying the effects of
From 1990 to 1994 Oppenheimer served as chairman and chief of clinical service in the Department of Paediatrics in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked as senior specialist paediatrician in Brunei from 1994 to 1996. He returned to England in 1997, writing the book Eden in the East: the drowned continent of Southeast Asia, published in 1998. The book synthesised work across a range of disciplines, including oceanography, archaeology, linguistics, social anthropology and human genetics.[1]
He continued to write books and articles, and began a second career as a researcher and popular-science writer on human
Books by Oppenheimer
- Eden in the East. 1999, Phoenix (Orion) ISBN 0-7538-0679-7
- Out of Eden. 2004, Constable and Robinson ISBN 1-84119-894-3UK title of The Real Eve.
- The Real Eve. Carroll & Graf; (9 September 2004) ISBN 0-7867-1334-8US title of Out of Eden.
- The Real Eve. Carroll & Graf; (9 September 2004)
- The Origins of the British – A Genetic Detective Story. 2006, Constable and Robinson. ISBN 978-1-84529-482-3).
Eden in the East
In his book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, published in 1998, Oppenheimer argues that the rise in ocean levels that accompanied the waning of the ice age—as much as 500 feet (150 m)—during the period 14,000–7,000 years ago, must be taken into account when trying to understand the flow of genes and culture in Eurasia. Citing evidence from geology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and folklore, he hypothesizes that the Southeast Asian subcontinent of Sundaland was home to a rich and original culture that was dispersed when Sundaland was mostly submerged and its population moved westward. According to Oppenheimer, Sundaland's culture may have reached India and Mesopotamia, becoming the root for the innovative cultures that developed in those areas. He also suggests that the Austronesian languages originate from Sundaland and that a Neolithic Revolution may have started there.[2]
The Real Eve (documentary and US book title) / Out of Eden (UK book title)
In 2002, Oppenheimer worked as consultant on a television documentary series, The Real Eve, produced by the American cable TV network the Discovery Channel and directed by Andrew Piddington. The series was known as Where We Came From in the United Kingdom. The "Eve" in the title refers to
Following the series, Oppenheimer published a book on the same theme, originally titled Out of Eden in the UK and republished as The Real Eve in the US. This work, published in 2004, focuses on Oppenheimer's hypothesis: that approximately 85 thousand years ago, a group of modern humans migrated from East Africa across the Red Sea to South Asia in a single major exodus numbering no more than a few hundred individuals. This lone group of wanderers, he suggests, were the ancestors of all the peoples of the earth except sub-Saharan Africans, their descendants having since migrated all over the Eurasian continent, North Africa, the Pacific islands, and the New World, and radiated into a plurality of physical characteristics, languages, ethnicities and cultures as seen today.[3]
Origins of the British
In his 2006 book The Origins of the British (revised in 2007), Oppenheimer argued that neither
See also
- James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, earliest philosopher to formulate the one-source theory
- Jared Diamond
- Robert A. Foley
- Toomas Kivisild
- Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
- Chris Stringer
- Bryan Sykes
References
- ^ a b c d University of Oxford: Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology: Stephen Oppenheimer: Summary of main research interests Archived 19 April 2010 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 18 November 2009.
- S2CID 224792124
- ^ Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World, Stephen Oppenheimer, Constable and Robinson 2004
- ^ Stephen Oppenheimer, "Myths of British ancestry", Prospect, October 2006. Retrieved 23 August 2008.
- ^ Stephen Oppenheimer, "Myths of British ancestry revisited", Prospect, June 2007. Retrieved 23 August 2008.
- PMID 30988490.
- PMID 29466337.
External links
- "Journey of Mankind"
- Review of Oppenheimer's Eden in the East
- "Look who was talking", Article by Stephen Oppenheimer, The Guardian, 7 August 2003
- "Fast trains, slow boats, and the ancestry of the Polynesian islanders", link to an article by Stephen Oppenheimer & Martin Richards, Science Progress, 22 September 2001
- Discovery Program Q&A with Stephen Oppenheimer on the "Real Eve"
- "Myths of British ancestry", Article by Stephen Oppenheimer, Prospect Magazine, October 2006
- New York Times article: "A United Kingdom? Maybe"